Posts by Billa Bong

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Re: Cabin crew

I've been on a few flights with similar experiences (drinks down suits, etc.) but on one of the calmer flights I flew there was a little period of bumpiness where the crew were looking absolutely fine, as were (most of) the passengers. However, about 5 minutes after the bumps the lady looking after my section suddenly looked a little drained and took a break on the jump seat in front of me (exit row, first through US immigration...). She confessed to me quietly that she hates and fears turbulence, but hides it as best she can due to reflected fear...

Lesson to learn: The crew are humans with the same insecurities and fears as the rest of us. Sure, they face it more often but that doesn't necessarily make it any easier on them.

Since then I've not looked at them. Since quite a lot of turbulence that some would find uncomfortable is no worse than shutting your eyes as a passenger in a car going over bumpy road, I now just shut my eyes and imagine just that...

Re: Hmm...

"Whilst the 123-reg VPS product is an unmanaged service, we have committed a large number of resources to help restore services back to normal as quickly as possible"

You're more temperate than I would be (even though I moved away from 123-reg a long time ago due to this sort of attitude). I'd be spitting nails! It's almost, but not quite, saying "you know what, guys - we can run a script and delete all your data and we don't have to do anything about it. it's all down to you to recover. But we will do something about it, because we're good guys. Here's a video of a fluffy bunny eating a carrot to amuse you, which again, we didn't have to provide but we did because we're the good guys."

While I accept that customers not taking their own backup us a little foolish, it's bordering incompetent for a service provider to not provide service assurance through maintenance, period. They're doing the work which has risk, they should have a mitigation plan in place in case of error causing this sort of issue, else they need to make it very clear in terms of service that there is no guarantee at all of service delivery, which would turn most people with flourishing businesses away from them as a provider.

While I'm on the subject, and since you brought up marketing, do you think in a few days 123-reg will turn around and say "ha ha, no one was impacted at all, it was all a joke to get our company talked about", just like the rm -rf guy? Would anyone actually go to a company that pretended to be incompetent in order to get their name in the news? Personally, I wouldn't...

I pushed out a standard phone system and phone model across the whole company (after consultation), where it would then be dead simple to do things like assign the soft key functions, standardize everything about the way it works.

Then users happened.

"Why can't we use our old phone [because I'm stuck in the past when rota-dial was cool]?"

"I used to be able to push this key sequence and it would do it for me [not realizing that a system that uses 999 as a shortcut to the conferencing system might not be a great plan...]"

"I never use that function, can't it be changed to this function instead [because although I'm the only person in the company that uses it I'm clearly more important]?"

"Why don't we use <latest fancy brand phone> [because I used it once and thought it looked nice]?"

Then it got even worse. Users were bringing in <insert name of any old phone> here and connecting it, expecting it to work off the bat. One office manager decided he didn't like something about the phone, so bought his whole office a new one and only after asked how to make them work.

Re: I never liked them anyway...

You pride yourself on have a personal relationship with your local takeaways, but have to google their numbers...?

A scalper makes something available that is not available from the official source at a heavily marked up price, which I think is inaccurate here...?

You call HungryHouse a scalper, but presumably you use Amazon for purchasing items from time to time where eventually you'll be buying through Amazon from a 3rd party; are they scalpers also...?

You don't have to use hungryhouse. Just keep the takeaway menus by your phone and dial them direct. No one is forcing you to use this service, nor post such a strange response to a technical article about proper online account security.

Kudos to HH for taking precautionary measures on behalf of any customers you have that may have recycled passwords, even if the communication to those customers seems to have left a little to be desired among them.

Re: Three weeks without being able to send mail

Vindicated!

Wow! It couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of cowboys. I ditched them after a terrible run of errors both technical and billing left me out of pocket (money and time), and the support channel seemed to be a single guy who couldn't find his <user input required>.

Changed provider, haven't had *any* issues that weren't resolved in a timely manner by a support team who actually understood basic terminology. If you want to know how *not* to run a host/domain registrar, look at FP.

Re: Where did it go?

Re: Oh well

I'm still on contract with O2 until September, but I have a PAYG sim on 3 to use when traveling. The difference is a tenth the cost or less.

O2 charge £6 per meg, max £40 but also max 50MB, 3 give you data roaming for £10 up to 250MB (or 1G for £15). Call costs are "as at home" on 3, including free for incoming, O2 is nothing short of piracy IMO.

Re: El Reg readers would agree with this

Ok, well firstly it wasn't I that started with the whole dullard thing - it was from the original post and I used the word, personally preferring it over "moron".

All we're talking about here is the user majority opinion driving change, I have two points:

- if you think that users who don't know how to voice their opinions are dumb, and if they're not dumb they'd agree with you on the UI, that's a pretty arrogant stance.

- when a company is dealing with dropping market share they have to do something. Looking at who is winning those migrating away (i.e. Chrome) and heading in a similar direction is a legitimate strategy. Although that's *not* guaranteed to work it's better than no product development at all.

You've successfully built an argument on vapourware. We're all guessing and applying our own opinions to the mix, but "I don't like it and a few others I've spoken too (who happen to have my background in IT) agree" isn't grounds for assumption on opinion of user majority.

El Reg readers would agree with this

I'm only taking a pragmatic view here, though I suspect I know what the outcome will be...

I need a citation for the assertion that their user experience profiling only goes as deep as taking their developers own views. They probably go deeper than that (NB, I did say "probably").

Surely they have to pander to the majority in order to bring general user counts up enough to be able to sell whatever it is they sell to make FF and keep it free. My mum would never use half the stuff that "confuses her" about previous releases and she's glad their gone (after I forced it on her a few years ago by removing all the IE icons I could find). I suspect that this holds true for the user majority.

I would wager that El Reg users would in general agree with the above statements only because they're not in this majority. Indeed, I was also very confused when a recent update moved stuff around, but a quick add-on here, theme change there, customisation everywhere and I'm back on track for the most part.

Besides all that, what feedback have you given Mozilla on your experience as a result of the changes? If none, then they don't know you exist, let alone your views, and they will never be able to meet expectations of users whom they know nothing about. If the dullards demanding simple are more vocal than you, then you lose, I'm afraid.

Saving money

We had a Mitel system in one office and ditched it in favour of something else when it became clear that we needed an organisation wide system to cover many offices and remote workers.

Asterisk is a great project and it's well worth looking into the many commercial systems built on it (some of which are charge free for basics and then billed for support or super functionality). And if you need something extra special, it has the capability even if you have to get a consultant or better DIY.

Re: VOIPity VOIP VOIP

While that's broadly speaking true, it's not hard to train someone up, and if you have cash to burn it's even easier to find someone who in a single day can look over your existing kit and tell you what you need. All it cost us was a PoE switch and a UPS to power the PBX server (which a low power job), PoE and anything else on which the PBX relied. But then we also backed it up with a duplicate configured PBX at a separate location - press the button and everyone is back online (only from home or on their mobile instead of desk phone). It's a DR success story!

Re: Doppler etc...

So by my read of the above (thanks - I learned a lot today), it *is* sort of to do with Doppler, but not on frequency, on timeband multiplexing.

Again, if the base station needs the cell to be at a known distance (rather than very specific frequency) my original suggestion of just placing it far enough away from the runway would work, as the change in distance away will be dampened by Mr. Sine and Cosine as the car drives past.

You could even place many cells parallel to the route and pick up the one that the car/plane is passing.

Joking aside...

Surely the problem is solved rather than testing P2P links traveling in opposite directions, just have a relay point some distance off the "runway" such that the relative speed of distance change is not that great if not zero at the point where the vehicle is expected to hit maximum velocity...?

(I'm not going to suggest that the car drives around to maintain an exact distance, because ground based vehicles traveling at that speed don't do turning very well...)

This is a joke, right?

I started to report fake pages when they started to appear, but after about 100 reports I stopped, for two very good reasons:

1. Only *2* of the reports I made had a response from Facebook saying "thanks for your feed back, that post has been removed"

2. On those 2, they were feed back at least a week after I reported them.

These fake pages rely on the message being broadcast to a lot of people in a short space of time. By the time they were removed they would have had the desired effect - dupe meeeeellions of people.

For facebook at accept posts from new (throw away) users as genuine is just irresponsible. Now I just hide what I don't want to see, because having to stab away at my screen another 2 or 3 times to report what I've hidden just isn't worth the effort, even if they are now planning on "tagging" these reported posts (hey, has anyone thought that real company's competitors and their clients may not be so honest in their reports? At what point does the markup appear? There are too many holes for this to work IMO).

To get a job as a Microsoft researcher

Use the phrase "hey, I've got an idea!", involve at least one MS product and one non-MS product in conjunction. No need to think about practicalities, efficiency, or even a *requirement*. I didn't think it would be possible but this actually beats their "whole room immersive experience", a solution with no problem and merely "meh" until someone stomps on the cat/dog/baby/breakable item.

Still, it could be worse... they could be suggesting that mobile phone manufactures put a solar panel on the surface of the phone so that you get into the habit of not putting it safely into your pocket but rather leaving it on the table in a crowded coffee shop, on a train, etc... Oh...

Rural areas no place for business?

That's what several people are saying above.

I have a client who needs to be physically where they are. They have 2 live ADSL lines, one of which breaks every 3-7 days and the other of which is dog-slow. Having battled with various ADSL "providers" (i.e. bill generators) and OpenReach for 5 years they have no better a connection now than back then. Each successive "fix" doesn't actually fix anything, only restore service temporarily.

However, unlike 5 years ago their suppliers have moved all their services online. The companies that provide their business management software have removed the dedicated server they had on premise and put them in the cloud. Their clients have insisted that everything is done electronically.

So the upshot isn't that my client is in the wrong place, but people and companies assume that "everyone can use the internet, right?"... wrong, I'm afraid. Very wrong.

Was the video legit footage?

Finger monitor is good enough

A child with asthma, so we have one to hand always. Couple of quid from eBay. The other children without asthma love it. Let's play "who can make their heart go the fastest by running round mad"... Let's play "what happens if I hold my breath".

The only people I can see buying this teddy are misguided NHS management (who will pay 10x the price) and overly concerned parents who don't need to look at these stats 99% of the time and will worry when they do, even in the normal range. And when something *does* go wrong, asking where the f-ing teddy has gone isn't the best care provision. Reaching into the childs emergency bag for a 3xcmx3cmx4cm finger monitor is the answer.

Re: @Trevor

By 'eck Trev, if this is how you take to mosquitos I dread to think of your opinion on other "parasites of humanity" (I could name you a few). On average a mosi bite is just an annoyance, with an unfortunate end to a very small minority, an average that could be moved further towards benign by assisting developing countries with known defense and treatment for some of the diseases. I say just go buy Jungle Formula and sleep under a net. I personally could live without them, but I don't want to live in a world where we can make the decision to wipe out a species just like that...

Re: Change DNS

Unless you want to use parental controls provided by BT, when doing this will cause the router to intercept all traffic to web sites that it didn't provide the IP for and show a "naughty naughty" page.

Found a burgler in my house...

I asked him wtf he was doing, he responded:

Taking into account the educational nature of the security issues found in your home, and what seems to be an appreciation you have for arbitrary security research, we hope you will make it possible for us to complete our work.

Re: Boohoo @ Ragarath

I up-vote because I can, and because you deserve it for that observation.

I think the reason is simply that we as a culture are so poor at rational, thoughtful complaint (not slander) direct to the appropriate party. We, as a nation, somehow feel "protected" by the anonymity of the internet, not having to deal direct with the person that has perceptively disadvantaged us.

I wish that it was possible to prevent anyone posting a review online before at least trying to speak direct to the owner/manager about the issues. It might not stop you wanting to post a bad review, but will at least give them the opportunity to put things right or express their side of the tale, thus giving you more of an objective view (or confirming that the reason the establishment is so poor is bad management). Of course practically it's impossible to do this, so I guess keep calm and carry on...

Re: Panic!

Who's have thought that an article about Russian space activities would end up in a topical discussion about the proper way to cook a bird (and which bird too). Thanks to all for a good chuckle and some fresh ideas, which I'll pass on to the head chef of this years glutton-fest.

Panic!

"Naturally, the tendency is for everyone to start panicking about the Cold War and assuming that the craft is some sort of war satellite or an anti-satellite weapon that’s going to start shooting all of the other sats out of the sky."

I'm interested - is this the first time that a satalite has gone up without anyone knowing what it's for (or rather not being told what it's for, because let's face it, who really knows what hidden functions relatively benign "communications" satalites have)? Or is just just because it's Russian?

Arrears

My wife started paying back a loan (student loan to be precise) and was surprised several months later to be sent an arrears letter, given that she had paid several months by that point. On phoning the company they said "no, don't worry, you're not in arrears". This continued for several more months until she finally spoke to someone who knew that their system would show "arrears" to the telephone operators *only* if it was the *last* payment that was missed. We're still at a loss, having not received any kind of notification from the bank on a refused payment, as to how the first month was missed. My money is on their system not setting up the DD with the bank before trying to take the initial payment.

Re: Their Description is Right too..

Product placement aside

Who's going to want to attach one half of the brick holder on to the back of their nice stylishly designed phone permanently anyway? And having the rotation of the steering wheel while driving is going to make navigation a real... joy...

Re: Great... until you go away on a trip

Plus...

The mention of wearables is made several times - so we're replacing a password that I have in my head plus a mobile phone that I have in my pocket with a password that I have in my head (typed in my own unique way... you know, wrong, wrong with caps on, wrong typed slowly and then right when I remember I changed it last week) while wearing a device (which of course will never get lost unlike a mobile phone, right?) at a particular location (unless I happen to be somewhere else).